Improving Spray Results

Improving Spray Results. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Improving the efficacy of your orchard spraying can have a major impact on your operation. Gwen Hoheisel, WSU Prosser, recently spoke on how to improve spray results.

HOHEISEL: Our goal should be that every drop gets to the crop so that we stay with our entire spray within one canopy row and every drop that came from your sprayer went onto your target.

Hoheisel says the research shows a great deal of lack of efficiency.

HOHEISEL: When I think about it I think about ways that we could do - improvements in hitting the targets, improvements in covering the target and then improvements in putting the right amount on the target. We know that the job of air is to move a drop from the machine to the canopy and we know that we want the air to rustle it up. But the problem is that our trees aren’t shaped that way any more. They’re not 30 feet in the air so we often apply too much air. And there’s good research out there that says with the amount of air that we are applying that 40-60% of your spray is lost to the ground or the air.

She says that is a $36 dollar loss on a $60 spray.

HOHEISEL: We also have a problem sometimes on our sprayers about matching the amount of air to the canopy. Especially when we start talking about early season and young trees. So the way that I think about air is that air flow controls and allows you to control where you want to put the droplets. That’s what its job was.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.